The Prague Orgy [Hardcover]

Philip ROTH (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape (1969)
• ASIN: B001CXPDME
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

More About the Author

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient." In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003--2004." In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not worth buying on its own, May 18, 2000

By 

Edward A. Olson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prague Orgy (Paperback)

This is good reading when preceded by the first three Zuckerman books. If you can find Zuckerman Bound, buy that, and get this baby included in the collection. That work, with 3 novels and this novella, is one of the best books Ive read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Novella for Fans of the Zuckerman Oeuvre, November 7, 2010

By 

Ethan Cooper (Big Apple) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Prague Orgy (Paperback)

One cluster of Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels follows the writer Nathan Zuckerman through the career stages of young apprentice writer (THE GHOST WRITER), guilty successful rising novelist (ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND), and troubled and libidinous novelist with writer's block (THE ANATOMY LESSON). In each of these novels, Roth examines the nature of literary success while providing a backstory of associated family resentments and guilt.

In the novella, THE PRAGUE ORGY, Roth examines Zuckerman in a new stage of his literary career. Specifically, TPO shows Zuckerman, now a renowned novelist, traveling to Communist Czechoslovakia in 1976. There, he tries to acquire hundreds of unpublished stories written by what another character calls the "Yiddish Flaubert." Without Zuckerman's intervention, this literary and cultural trove may otherwise be lost through fickle communist censorship or their complicated stewardship by an alcoholic Czechoslovakian writer.

Chronologically, TPO is a natural addition to this cluster of Zuckerman novels, functioning as the caboose to this short literary train. But thematically, TPO moves into new territory. In particular, this three-part novella shows the celebrity novelist Zuckerman: being manipulated by an émigré literary operator; encountering a demoralized and eviscerated cultural world in Communist Prague; and trying to understand his motivation and boundaries as he tries to smuggle the stories to the West. Roth, in other words, has shifted his focus from tortured literary ambition and success to what is primarily an examination of artistic endeavor in a police state. As a result, the emotional conflicts that make the other Zuckerman novels in this cluster so fascinating get short shrift.

Not that I'm so well read; but I also think that Central and Eastern European writers (Danilo Kis, for example) who lived under Stalinist and Communist rule are superior at capturing the human despair that develops in a police state. In TPO, Zuckerman parachutes into Prague, where he conveys the outsider's point of view.

Regardless, this is a worthwhile read for Roth fans. Further, it does show Roth, yet again, converting his own life experience into fiction. Wasn't he, after all, deeply involved in the worthy cause of helping downtrodden Central and Eastern European writers at the time TPO's publication?

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a concise satyrical report from Prague of the 1970s, as it could be seen by an American writer, April 13, 2007

By 

Aleksandra Nita-Lazar (MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prague Orgy (Paperback)

The small novel, or rather novella, The Prague Orgy" can be treated as an appendix to the trilogy about the Jewish-American writer Nathan Zuckerman. This slim volume is the example of the real wave of the novels appearing in the 1980s by American authors, who described the Eastern European countries under the communist regime, most often based on the personal experience from their travels.

Nathan Zuckerman, already a renowned writer, finds himself in Prague under Soviet occupation in the mid-1970s. He has a mission to recovers the manuscripts of the short stories written by the father of a Czech emigre writer.

The book is given as excerpts from Nathan's diary, starting with the meeting with the Czech writer, Zdenek Sisovsky, and his lover, a tragic actress Eva Kalinova, in New York, and continuing with the relation of his trip to Prague. The reader is presented with an amazing array of intellectuals, demoralized by the system. The enormous number of delightfully colorful characters and their stories, skilfully woven into the concise text is perhaps the major achievement of The Prague Orgy", which gives is a stand on its own, athough it has more of the gems to be uncovered by an attentive reader. There are numerous literary allusions, jokes and irony - the whole book is more like a pastiche in Roth's unforgettable style. I can imagine that when the book appeared, it was one of the shocking reports from behind the Iron Curtain, which, additionally, had to be taken with a grain of salt (I wonder what were Roth's real impressions...). Nowadays it still reads well.

Although The Prague Orgy" is a complete work in itself, it is recommended to know other novels about Nathan Zuckerman before reading it, to fully understand the character of Zuckerman and his attitude.